A champion of the English language (the author of How Language Works, The Fight for English, and The Stories of English) and his son, a Shakespearean actor, together present this pithy miscellany of random facts and entertaining insights about the Bard of Stratford. Here are essential biographical facts (and fictions) that have been peddled for centuries, as well as a great deal of information that will be unfamiliar to most general readers, on such topics as anachronisms, the lost plays, what Shakespeare would have studied at school, pronunciation, why the Globe burned down, the difference between a folio and a quarto, and malapropisms.